[lit-ideas] Re: Empire definitions, British and Russian
- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 17:04:22 -0400
>> each wave killed one way or another those who did not resist
Location, location, location.
The Soviet Empire excelled at only three things: industrialized murder
of its own citizens, espionage, and international PR. _The Venona
Decrypts_ show the last two were part of the same effort. (It was
depressing to learn that Grandmaster Alekhine--declared persona non
grata by Stalin--was likely murdered by KGB after WW2 to make way for
the Soviet Chess "Empire." So his son asserts. The local medical
examiner and forensic photographer was a Communist Party leader in the
Portuguese town. However, there is much more evidence.)
In line with Lawrence's comments, Stalin's Gulag System murdered at
least 62.9 million Soviet citizens, not counting the 20 million who died
in WW2. Yeltsin opened the Soviet Archives in the early '90s, and
scholars were astounded at their underestimation of the death count:
over 15 Pol Pots. In addition, given that Stalin had murdered his best
generals in the '37 Purge, part of that 20 million war dead are directly
his responsibility. Soon, during Yeltsin I believe, the Archives were
closed to prevent further embarrassment.
A Marxist analysis of Marxism is also revealing. Marx foresaw the
nightmare while working on Das Kapital but swept it under the rug.
From _The Two Marxisms_ by Alvin W. Gouldner
[http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/DSS/Marx/ch13.htm]
But where is the nightmare in this? Not in the possibility that
barbarism will really triumph, which Marx mentions only parenthetically,
but in the possibility that the bourgeoisie were right all along and
that he was wrong. Now that is really a nightmare for a theorist. In
the nightmare, what happens is: private property really turns out to be
the basis of civilization; in the nightmare it is the rise of the
bourgeoisie that is the turning point of history, not their
expropriation; in the nightmare, socialism does not mean that the
proletariat becomes the ruling class, but that the state becomes the
dominant force-the infrastructure-and its bureaucracy the new ruling
class; in the nightmare this new collectivist state brings a new
stagnation to the economy, rather than a new productivity; in the
nightmare the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is not the basis of a new
emancipation but of a new, many times worse, domination.
[As in Stalin & Co. The next section examines imperialism.]
Consider the judgement passed on the early common ownership of land.
"While all civilised people begin with the common ownership of land,"
says Engels, "in the course of development this common ownership becomes
a fetter on production . . . is turned into private property," which, he
carefully adds, "by no means makes its appearance as the result of
slavery or violence." And then consider the paeans with which he greets
even slavery: "Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art, and
science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without Hellenism and the
Roman Empire as a base, also no modern Europe. We should never forget
that our whole economic, political and intellectual development has as
its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary
as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say:
Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism."
The bourgeoisie, says the Manifesto, "creates a world in its own image,"
compelling all nations to adopt its revolutionary civilization, to
renounce their backwardness and to enter the stream of world history.
"The bourgeoisie . . . draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilization . . . it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of
bourgeois, the East on the West." This is plainly the language of
Western superiority over Eastern "barbarianism," of a bourgeois manifest
destiny blindly preparing the ground for the next, higher stage of
Western development, to which the proletariat is heir.
There is an ambiguity in Marx's work, then, as to which break in history
was really decisive. For while the focus of Marx's early work on
socialism and the proletariat affirms that this is the important
dividing line in history, Marx's later work, after his studies of
oriental history, suggest that the real watersheds may have been the
irruption of proprietary classes in general and of the bourgeoisie in
particular. As Umberto Melotti notes (quoting from Marx's 1857
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy), "only capitalism, in
Marx's view, constituted a real qualitative jump in the process of man's
historical development, by breaking the stranglehold of nature: 'In all
forms in which landed property is the decisive factor, natural relations
still predominate; in the forms in which the decisive factor is capital,
social, historically produced elements predominate.'''
Underneath Marxism's primary paradigm, then, there was another very dim
scenario; there was a stifled embryo Marxism whose profound divergence
from the paradigm's public posture required that it remain unborn. From
a standpoint that assigns strategic significance to the shift from
landed property to capital, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie may not
be as historically significant as the emergence of capitalism; from a
comparative perspective on the stagnant Asiatic Mode of Production, the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie may appear to be a perilous experiment
threatening a new stagnation. In all this there is a rising redolence,
faint but pungent, of an ethnocentrism exalting the West as embodying a
unique promise for the world's future development.
[Ergo...]
In this nightmare scenario, it is the West that is the true agent of
historical development; the proletariat, caught in the cunning of
history, is the servant of that higher destiny. I have called this,
nightmare Marxism; yet nightmares are real and some have them. It is
likely that this nightmare flitted through more than one dream of German
social democracy and its Scientific Marxism.
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